


original air-blue gown

by betonprosa



Category: Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-19
Updated: 2012-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:50:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betonprosa/pseuds/betonprosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For all the wings her mother spun him, Alba's father never flew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	original air-blue gown

_\--all this stood upon her and was the world_  
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace  
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless  
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,  
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.  
  
  
As she endured it all: bore up under  
the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,  
the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn--  
  
Rainer Maria Rilke  


 

 

 

 

  
  
 **August 21st, 2018**  
 _Alba is 17_  
  
 _You're throwing your life away_ , Mama said this morning, when I was finished loading my suitcases into the taxi trunk. We stood at attention, making our stiff farewells, and finally I turned my back to her and climbed into the taxi's back seat.  
  
 _Your ma's upset_ , the driver said finally, when we'd rounded enough corners for distance.  
  
 _Yeah_ , I said against the window glass. _To O'Hare. And I'll pay you twenty fucking dollars more not to talk to me again until we're at the airport_.  
  
Before I know it, the plane's in the air and I've got my hands splayed against the window, watching Chicago and all its temporal ghosts fall away into nothingness.  
  
 _Walk on, walk on_ , my headphones whisper, and I am leaving my violin and my mother's stony rage and all of what once was Alba De Tamble behind.  
  
 **September 10th, 2020**  
 _Alba is 19_  
  
"I hate these books," Cinnamon says, and passes me another stack of Agatha Christies up the ladder. She's short, with skin that boils into freckles at the slightest hint of sunshine, and possesses a deep and abiding love for trashy romance novels that she hides behind book covers of more serious work. Right now she's got _The Cowboy and His Mistress_ on the counter, camouflaged by the razor-blade freed cover of a 1970 edition of _The Fellowship of the Ring_.  
  
Cinnamon hired me, she says, because I'm tall enough to reach the top shelves of the floor-to-ceiling book cases that take up almost every free square inch of her used book shop. And because I don't mind cleaning Arthur's litter box, and am mostly successful at finding _that one book with the blue cover, the one they had on television this morning_ \--  
  
"What, did Hercule Poirot bang your mother or something?"  
  
"Don't be crass, Alba. The--here, these," and she hands me books: _Galileo's Daughter. The Pilot's Wife. The Lighthouse Keeper's Mother. The Soldier's Sister._  
  
"Limits," Cinnamon says. "Like this woman-- _Shelia Byers has a terrible secret: her brother is a_ \--like she's bound up in a coordinate plane where she's defined as a point-- "  
  
Pretentious shit.  
  
I'm walking home that night, after Cinnamon and I have finished shelving the remainder of the mysteries, and my cell vibrates in my jeans pocket and when I look at the screen to see who's calling it's Mama.  
  
I hold the phone in my hand and watch it twitch itself into silence.  
  
Mama didn't want me to come here, to New York and a state school at that; Mama wanted me to stay in Chicago and study violin performance at some private conservatory and live out a life limited by the future that my father saw for me. Mama wanted me to watch her build endless paper sculptures of wings fundamentally incapable of flight that grow more and more brittle with each year that my father does not miraculously fall out of time and death and silence.  
  
I smashed the heel of my hand into my father's nose when I was fifteen, the last time I saw him, the end of my List. _Jesus fuck Alba the hell_ \--and he shook me by the shoulders until little coronas sparked in the edges of my vision--and I said _Because of Mama_ and when I tapped him on the arm a few minutes later we both pretended that his red-blurred eyes didn't mean a thing.  
  
Later that afternoon he showed me how to pick a pin tumbler, and we had ice cream after a few picked pockets, and finally he doubled over, convulsed with time, as we waited for the L at the Conservatory station.  
  
The moment before he was gone he looked right at me, beyond me, as if he could see my mother locked up tight within the contours of my face and said _Oh God oh Christ oh Alba oh Clare Clare I'm_ \--  
  
I filled in the words for my mother when I collapsed back against the tiles of my bathroom floor, bruises from my father's hands fanned out across my shoulders.  
  
 _He said he was sorry, Mama_ , I lied, and that fall my mother took all the photographs she had of my father and shredded them into the fabric of a flock of crows suspended from a hangman's gallows.  
  
 **January 4th, 1979 and March 31st, 2022**  
 _Alba is 21_  
  
I want a pair of Nikes, or Converses, or something flat-soled enough that I can run, but this poor bastard is some flower child lost between the Age of Aquarius and Johnny Ramone, so what I find are hiking boots two or three sizes too big for me and a pea coat trying its best to be punk.  
  
He's almost awake, Flower Child, and so when he sits up, scrubbing at his eyes with hands like ham hocks, and asks _who the fuck're you, sweetheart?_ I button up his jacket, kiss the tip of his nose and say _the ghost of finals future_.  
  
Flower Child reaches for me and I'm darting out of his dorm room, my dorm room in about half a century or so, give or take a few grains of years, and down the stairs one step after another, ankles slamming against the heels of my boots. Out the hall door, into the street, into the snow, and I slow up, skidding a little on the ice.  
  
It's snowing, the flakes pinned against the clouds by streetlights, and ahead of me as far as I can see the stoplights are sending out semaphore-- _short long short long long_ \--and behind me I hear the hall door fly open and shit motherfucker I had to steal boots and a coat from some hippie behemoth who looks to be less about peace and love and more about fists to the face and blood-splattered snow.  
  
I stumble into a jog, confident in the knowledge that I'll have blisters in ten steps flat, and as ever, as always, my strides lengthen, heels slamming against the concrete, and I'm flying towards the nearest stoplight, the world narrowing to the hitch of breath in my chest and the rushing white noise that fills up my ears and the shadows of myself flanking me, and for once, for once, time is no longer my enemy.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for globalfruitbat in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge


End file.
